Friday, January 14, 2011

Life in Auckland

We've been living in Auckland the past month, excited to be in the City of Sails with the highest boat per people ownership in the world. Most of our time has been working on Kamaya, preparing her for sale ... so if anyone wants to live their dream, Kamaya is an incredible comfortable, sturdy, beautiful floating home. We just put a tab on the blog with details about our wonderful home and we're creating a separate website.

In between, sanding, varnishing,

cleaning, buffing, polishing and more, we've also had some fun. Fortunately, we have friendly boat neighbors, especially, Innocenti, a Kiwi boat-family with three kids, Celia, Fergus, and Rachel and parents, Angus and Anna.

Over the holidays, Maya and Celia created a performance that's took halyard swinging to almost a Cirque de Soleil level .

Kai and Fergus played the monkeys high up in the peanut gallery.

Evi, our friend from the boat Wonderland, came down from Opua up in the North to help out, mostly by eating ice cream with Maya and Kai and exploring the city with them. They went up the sky tower and fortunately didn't bungy jump, like this man.

We also farm/house-sat our friend Robin's place over the holidays and took care of Billy the goat, Tara the dog, Stormy the cat and the clucking chickens and boisterous rooster.

Here, Billy is looking fairly obedient, but sometimes he wasn't so good. One day he bucked his way through the chicken coop and into the garden.

And he also wanted to come with us in the car -- that mischievous goat.

Tara the dog liked to sleep with Kai.

And Maya fed the chickens twice a day.

Overall, Auckland's a fantastic city. The jury is still out whether farm life beats boat life -- both are pretty demanding.